


Mirror and Stone

by likeafouralarmfire



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gentleness, I enjoyed writing this more than anything else for this fandom, Poetry, Reading, Rumi, Walt Whitman - Freeform, alternating pov, null POV, opioid use (appropriately for pain) in case that's a sensitive issue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 18:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10599966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeafouralarmfire/pseuds/likeafouralarmfire
Summary: Shaw reads Rumi to Root on a warm night.





	

Sameen’s voice in Farsi is liquid and gentle. At least, it seems that way to you now, hearing her speak for the first time, your head in her lap and your eyes closed. One hand weaves through your hair; the other holds her father’s battered copy of Rumi’s love poetry.

It’s late, but neither of you can sleep. The spring night is unseasonably warm, so you’ve folded back the sheets and are currently sweating in a tank top and a pair of boxers from Sameen’s drawer. Seemed fair to steal, since you’re the one who dropped off and picked up her laundry at the wash-and-fold around the corner. The shirt you’re wearing is old enough that, even freshly laundered, it smells like her.

You don’t know what the words mean; you simply let them wash over you and through you. Sameen reads limpidly, fluently, in musical phrases. She smooths hair over your temple, cards through the strands, winds a curl around her finger.

The heat is making your shoulder ache; the painkillers you reluctantly took have only just started to work through your body and soften your thoughts. None of that matters much now, with your cheek resting on Sameen’s inner thigh and her voice pouring over and into every part of you.

* * *

  
_When I am with you, we stay up all night.  
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep._

_Praise God for these two insomnias!  
And the difference between them._

This one he never read aloud at bedtime, but it was clearly a favorite of his: where the book fell open of its own accord, the paper thinner and darker where the divots of his thumbs held the pages apart. Dad always held his books with both hands, even small paperbacks like this. Being careful about how you opened your books, he said, kept the spines intact.

Root’s head is heavy; her body is curled into a question mark over the sheets. It doesn’t feel like she’s asleep—her breathing is alert—but she doesn’t make a sound. Her hair is still a little damp from the shower she took earlier to cool off. The city is muggy and sticky and slow tonight, like time is trudging through quicksand, and normal rules don’t seem to apply. Rules like Root not stealing clean shirts, or curling up like a little lap animal and asking to be read to. She asked for something for her pain earlier—for the first time—and she seems so lonely tonight with the voice in her ear gone silent that it doesn’t seem so bad to indulge her a little.

“What does it mean?” she asks, at the end of the stanza. “The poem?”

“This part? It’s—about not being able to sleep.”

She hums and stirs. “Sounds familiar.”

It would be hard to sleep now, without her. Didn’t used to matter that she charged into every stupid kind of danger; that was her business. But now, when she doesn’t come home, it’s worrying. The idea that she could be anywhere isn’t neutral anymore. A reason to pace and ponder dark scenarios until her key sings in the door and she’s here and safe.

When she’s here and the night is warm and her pain seems to rise from her, sleep won’t come.

Without her, these days, sleep is impossible.

* * *

  
Sameen has told you about how her father used to read to her when she was young. In English and in Farsi. He taught her about his favorite poets: Rumi, Fereydoon Moshiri, Walt Whitman.

The last you too can quote by heart. Whitman was the closest your bleak high school years provided to an affirmation of your secret feelings. Of the possibility of joy, when all you knew was the loneliness of inchoate longing. _Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me. Ah lover and perfect equal, I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections, And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you._

But in all of your disaffected youth, you never dreamed it was possible to feel like this. To fall in love with a woman and know in your bones that what you’re feeling is right and good. To love her mind and her purpose and the way she's discovered the like in you. To tell her the song of yourself that no one ever cared to listen to before. To get lost in her, her voice and the smell of her skin; to undress her and touch her and kiss her mouth and wake up with her hand over your heart. To wear her shirts and think of her when she’s away. _Ah lover and perfect equal._

“Still awake?” asks Sameen, pausing to smooth your hair gently back over your ear. “Pills helping?”

“Kicking in. I feel… soft.”

“Want me to keep reading?”

“Yes, please.”

* * *

  
_The minute I heard my first love story_  
I started looking for you, not knowing  
how blind that was.

_Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.  
They’re in each other all along._

Root is getting heavier as the pills soften her around the edges. She’s awake, but her chest is rising and falling more slowly. She looks so young, so helpless, curled up into herself like this. Her hair still sticking, clammy, in locks that look like an illustration of a mermaid.

This poem is familiar almost to the point of rote memory. Not in his voice, but from years of reading it silently in the years since his voice disappeared forever. The book opened itself to this page by the time he died, but the spine only broke in the same place a few years ago. Holding books one-handed will do that.

It’s probably good that Root doesn’t understand the poem. It would be hard for her to hear the words if she understood what they meant. Seems unfair, the way she wants so much, gives so much, and expects so little. And anyway, the subtle parts, the music, would get lost in translation. These things always do. Rumi aside, there’s a gulf that can’t be crossed from language to language, from person to person.

Root nudges herself as close as she can to that precipice—the way she does in everything—and takes the danger with the thrill. She presses up against the knife edge of pain, takes stupid risks, because all her life she’s had nothing to lose. Her body, her whole being, is nothing to her.

But her body isn’t nothing. She isn’t nothing. She must know that by now, that she isn’t just an interface or a vessel. Root is her own, brilliant and beautiful. It doesn’t take the Machine to put light and life inside of her. The light must always have been there, just waiting to be seen.

* * *

  
Your body is melting into her, into the bed. Her voice has taken on a dreamy underwater quality. The warmth of the air and the warmth of her body wrap around you in a seamless blanket.

Is it just the haze that's settled over you, or has Sameen's voice slowed down, lingering with pleasure over the lines?  She's twisting locks of your hair absently as she reads, draping each curl over her lap. Writing lines of cursive on herself with you as her stylus.

She has written herself into you, spliced her code into yours, so that in the darkness you can no longer tell where you end and she begins.

* * *

  
_We are the mirror as well as the face in it._  
We are tasting the taste this minute  
of eternity. We are pain  
and what cures pain, both. We are  
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when it began, this constant hum of Root everywhere. There's a patch of mindspace set aside for her, a nest of thoughts and wondering and worry that can't seem to reset or clear away.

It's been growing for months, in spite of every effort to break it apart or make it smaller. Root planted herself in there, staunch and stubborn, and now these thoughts are as thick as spring wildflowers, spreading their pollen and scent all over.

In the abstract, love always sounded like a liability. People do stupid things when they fall in love. They throw themselves and things they care about into chaos. Like a drunk, a person in love sees double—the reasonable thing on one side, the thing they do for love on the other—and can’t tell which is which.

But maybe that’s not what love is, always. Maybe it’s not jumping into bad choices, just choosing in a different way. Maybe, sometimes, love is a too-hot night with the windows open, sweating underneath Root’s cheek and her blanket of sticky wet hair because right now she needs comfort and kindness. Maybe love isn’t a blurring of reality, but a shift in priorities. Comforting her over comfort. Keeping her safe over keeping safe.

And maybe that’s not so bad.

* * *

  
There’s still pain, but the pain feels faraway, like it’s across the water from the place where you are now, safe and damp and warm in Sameen’s lap, feeling her fingers sift through your hair as you listen to her read.

You want to ask again what the words mean, but she’s reading in a voice so soft and low that it feels like she’s telling you her deepest secret. She was the one who chose what to read to you, who told you that this was her father’s copy and that he had read Rumi’s poetry to her at her bedside. She didn’t have to tell you these things, but she did. Sometimes she gives you these gifts you don’t fully understand; you wonder if she understands them herself.

Sameen’s voice trails off—maybe the end of a stanza—and she pauses. A soft flap of air near your shoulders where she puts the book down. You feel the heat of her hand hovering gently over your face before she begins to trace the topography of your cheekbone, your temple, your lips, your jaw, with tentative fingertips. She must think you’re asleep—you almost are by now; you’ve lost all sense of time, so that she might have been touching your face for a few seconds or for minutes on end.

“Did you finish the poem?” you murmur. Her fingers stop their lines over the curve of your ear.

“Not quite,” she says. “I thought maybe you’d gone to sleep.”

“Not yet. Will you read the rest to me?”

Sameen picks the book back up and riffles to the right place. The pages whisper in your ear until she finds the spot she’s looking for.

“Here we go,” she says, and nests her free hand in your hair. “It’s almost finished.”

* * *

  
_I want to hold you close like a lute,  
so we can cry out with loving._

_You would rather throw stones at a mirror?  
I am your mirror, and here are the stones._

Root’s definitely asleep now. Her breath is deep and steady and slow, and her head feels impossibly heavy.

Cold swept over the night suddenly. In just a few minutes, the places slicked with sweat and damp have started to chill. Time to pull the sheets over Root, who’s shivering now in those skimpy clothes.

The final stanza of that poem would make sense to Root, if she could understand it. She’s the mirror, and the stones are everywhere. 

It’s weird, how familiar it’s gotten, how good it feels, to tuck her—carefully—into the crook of arm and chest. She’s warm and smells good: a little like sweat, a little like soap, and mostly like Root.

The soft sounds of the street float through the open window and into the room like a lullaby.


End file.
